I have a windows file sever with Dual Xeon E5-2650v4 cpus. They are 14 core each so 28 cores total.
The network interface is a Mellanox Connectx3 40gbs.
The disk drives in the server are 7.68TB Sata 6gbps ssds x8 in a Raid 0 (software windows stripe)
There are 200 render nodes reading data from the above server in order to render 3d frames.
The file server has one numa node or cpu using 100% and the 2nd cpus is not utilized that much.
The problem is that there are users who are working in the 3d applications that are experience slow downs while the render is going on. When there is no rendering the artists working on their projects experience no slowdowns. The Network is not saturated as there is only like 5gbps of network traffic to and from the server. The capacity is 40gbps.
So what could be the reason for the slowdown. One thing that i suspect is that the Mellanox network card is on a pci express slot that is wired to cpu2 and maybe that is the reason for CPU 2 being utilized 100%. There are thousands of small files that each render node is reading in order to render. So maybe the large amount of files could be causing the high cpu utilization.
Any ideas?